Over the last decade or so, many commercial and governmental entities have installed communication networks in order to allow their employees access to various network resources. To improve efficiency and to support mobility, many wireless access enhancements have been added to local, personal, and wide area networks. Based on these enhancements, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), Personal Area Networks (PANs) and Wide Area Networks (WLANs) have been and continue to be utilized by more and more users.
For instance, a WLAN supports communications between a number of wireless devices without any required line of sight for such communications. In current network configurations, multiple Access Points (APs), base stations or a central coordinator are connected to a wired network, such as an Ethernet network for example, and each AP operates as a relay station by supporting communications between resources of the wired network and wireless stations (STAs). STAs are fixed or mobile wireless devices, where the mobile devices enable users to alter their physical locations, but still communicate over the network.
In accordance with many WLAN transmission schemes, including transmission schemes operating in accordance with any Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standard, each wireless device must acknowledge any directed frames within a prescribed period of time commonly referred to as a “Short Interframe Space” or “SIFS”. This acknowledgement signaling occurs without verification of the content or source of the frame, and is merely used to confirm that the transmitted frame was successfully received so as to avoid unnecessary retransmissions.
One disadvantage associated with current WLANs is that the efficiency of these networks degrades as the number of wireless devices increase. Moreover, a substantial number of wireless devices may be incapable of initiating directed L2 unicast communications and only capable of responding to a communication initiated from another device or forwarding a communication from one device to another. However, L2 communications are valuable for gathering information concerning a particular wireless device and the quality of the wireless channel or link. Information gathered from L2 communications can be used to improve network security as well as overall performance. For instance, many conventional APs produced by other manufacturers are adapted to initiate broadcast transmissions, commonly referred to as “beacons,” but are incapable of initiating L2 unicast communications to a STA.
Hence, it would be advantageous to develop a communication scheme that enables any wireless device to communicate with another wireless device, and to make use of the L2 acknowledgement signaling requirements described above.